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Monday, August 15, 2016

Back to Wales

Last weekend I packed-up again for a weekend of fishing, this time exploring two of the Wild Streams of the Wye & Usk Foundation. The Wild Streams allow you to fish the small creeks and rivers, typically tributaries to the larger rivers like the Wye and Usk, for wild brown trout and grayling.

After are 3h drive to meet up with my new friend Craig who lives on the River Taff a few miles north of Cardiff, we drove through the stunning landscape of the Brecons for another 50 miles to our first river, the Upper River Irfon.

True to it's reputation as a wild trout stream, the fishing proved challenging and we needed to put on our A-game to fool some of it's small yet beautiful trout.

An Atlantic Salmon parr... wowzers!

Overall, we did very well indeed with a good number of fish caught, most small but there are larger inhabitants in some of the deeper runs.

And then a surprise... not just because of what I caught but the size!

The scenery was as I already mentioned stunning, I felt as if I was in a different world where Bilbo Baggins would come round the next bend and invite me to a hearty meal and some puffs of some Hobbits Weed.

On Sunday we had high hopes fishing the River Cammarch and catching some of it's famed grayling. Arriving at the river, it all looked very fishy and we caught fish in the very first pool. Things slowed down considerable as we moved upstream, we saw a few small fish darting around but none of the runs and pools you would expect to catch fish was holding any. We were wondering whether the fish fell victim to some of the resident predators (we observed a cormorant and a heron have a go at each other) or whether someone just fished the river just before us. We decided to most all the way to the upper end of the beat where the water was significantly smaller and more challenger to fish due to tight foliage. We still managed both to land a fish or two and called it a day mid afternoon as I had a 4.5h drive back to London.

The "early" fish of the day

Craig in action

Pheasants galore - I was tempted but did not fetch myself some fly tying stock...

Upper river wild brownie

a forest like from a fairy tale

Wales is always a trip worth and apparently I have been extremely lucky as far the weather is concerned, out of 7 days fishing in Wales this year it was raining (drizzle really) only one of those.

Who....?

My home is currently London where I moved to in 2015 from Denver, Colorado, where I started fishing tenkara in 2010. I grew up in Switzerland, then spent a few years in Vienna/Austria and moved then to the New York City area where I met my wife. I learned fly fishing in 1998 in the Austrian Alps while living Vienna/Austria.